Abstract
This brief essay introduces three papers by Hillary Grill, Sally Bjorklund, and Caryn Sherman-Meyer on the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on women’s subjectivity. Focusing on the need for reproductive choice and autonomy for women, I preview the ways in which the papers collectively argue for continued psychoanalytic engagement with feminist issues in a post-Roe world.
On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision—Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—that overturned Roe v. Wade and abrogated the federal constitutional right to abortion, jettisoning 50 years of precedent. The three papers that follow, by Hillary Grill, Sally Bjorklund, and Caryn Sherman-Meyer, grapple with the impact of this decision on women’s subjectivity and female psychological development, in particular around reproductive choices including pregnancy, abortion, motherhood, and adoption. The papers were first presented at the IARPP conference in Valencia, Spain, in the summer of 2023, and we publish them here as a suite as well. In all three, the repeal of Roe symbolizes the ways in which the patriarchy persists, yet can also serve as the catalyst for us to think differently, and more, about the myriad meanings of autonomy and choice for women. It’s in that spirit that these papers appear here, with the hope that they urge readers to remain engaged in a world quickly sliding into a judicially-imposed disregard of women.
All three writers emphasize the importance of contextualizing current events, and encourage us to think about history, politics, and culture as constitutive of the ways in which individual psyches both maintain and challenge the status quo. Hillary Grill offers us an account of the personal impact of abortion, detailing both her own experience and that of her patient, Beth, to illustrate the necessity of reproductive choice and bodily integrity for the unrestricted trajectory of women’s lives. Sally Bjorklund provides a compelling history of state involvement in women’s reproductive choices, detailing the ways in which women’s bodies and their “product,” children, have been used to further unconscious social, cultural, and political ends that have little or nothing to do with actual care for babies and children, let alone women, and interrogating the moral arguments made by those who seek to circumscribe women’s choices. Caryn Sherman-Meyer, considering Grill’s and Bjorklund’s papers together, adds her notion of “maternal capitalism” to our lexicon. She also reminds us of the ways in which race, economics, and culture intersect with women’s right to abortion, and argues that, despite its historically limited focus on women’s subjectivity, psychoanalysis can nevertheless offer important feminist critiques of theory and practice by considering the specific needs, desires, and rights of women.
The three papers highlight the dissociation that can arise as a response to the impingement on women’s subjectivity by outside forces—such as laws—that do not recognize female autonomy. In different ways, they focus on remembering the past, and encourage us to use it to challenge and expand possibilities in the present, offering an impassioned response to the rollback of women’s rights precipitated by the Dobbs decision. They remind us that the “self” is not an abstract or fictional concept, and that the integrity of individual experience is formed within a particular social context; the analysis of that experience can therefore serve as a large-scale critique of the factors that created it, by focusing on their emotional and psychological effects. The personal is political is personal is political, and articulating this never-ending cycle offers us the collective possibility of change, even at a dark political moment such as has been brought about, for many of us, by Dobbs.
As though the rollback of Roe v. Wade were not enough to destabilize, frighten, and infuriate, another monumental legal decision hit the news just as I was writing this brief introduction: the Alabama’s Supreme Court’s decision on IVF, which, among other things, designates embryos as “children.” Made possible by the Dobbs decision, this latest assault on and attempt to control women’s bodies and reproductive capabilities has further impinged on the notion that women are people, by elevating the rights of a clump of cells to personhood. A sustained psychoanalytic focus on women’s subjectivity, particularly around reproductive choices, could not be timelier.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Karen Perlman
Karen Perlman, PhD, LP, is a psychoanalyst in private practice working with children, adolescents, adults and families. She is Co-editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, as well as a member of NIP’s Curriculum Committee and on the editorial board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. A consultant over the years to a number of pre-schools, she speaks frequently in the community on topics relating to parenting and child development.